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Sophie Pritchard

Luke Stevens

Sarah Groves

Luke Stevens Evaluation

In what ways does your media product use, develop or challenge forms and conventions of real media products? 

Upon intense research into our genre, R&B/Hip Hop, we noticed a few major trends, our target convention to follow and deviate from was the voyeuristic treatment of the female body, as well as the point of view camera angle that would scan up and down a females body, we found that in certain music videos, such as the original music video for our chosen song would treat the female body as an object. We challenge this as we made our video look like a typical genre specific video and convinced people into believing it was targeted at men who like watching such videos, this changed, however, when the focus switched from girls to boys, perhaps shocking the audience, this shock appeal gave a comic effect to the video, which the song is notorious for, it has been used in many films and television, such as ‘Norbit’ and ‘Family Guy’. 

Like many R&B videos, it is a conceptual driven video, it does not feature a performance or a storyline, it is just a bunch of random clips mashed together, the editing is, like most videos, tailored to the beat, this adds a professional touch and makes it seem like the real thing, we developed some forms and conventions of real media products by challenging them, instead of making a video that appeals to only one particular audience, it adds a comedy side which can appeal to anyone the video is deemed appropriate for, this means it can make more money and even be virally spread, which is a very desirable trait in the modern world as viral ‘hype’ can be pivotal for the success or failure of a media product. It is very rare to see comedy in an R&B or Hip Hop music video, because rappers and artists from that genre like to take themselves seriously or have a certain persona that they want to keep up as it may gain them more respect, Kelis’ original video was not comedic, but the interpretations in TV and Film have been mainly comedy driven, this may be because it is a gimmicky song that has been overplayed on the radio and has lost it’s appeal as a serious song.

We found many inspirational videos that have helped us develop our music videos, mainly in film, we saw a carwash scene from the film ‘Dodgeball’ which includes an all male carwash team being completely dominated by a female team, the trade was going to the women as they were more attractive to the male audience. We also saw a parody of our song appear in the film ‘Date Movie’ which includes a woman dancing around the streets (similar to ‘Singing in the Rain) in a fatsuit.

A theory that we decided to take advantage of was Laura Mulvey’s Male Gaze theory, which outlines the fact that in music videos, the female body is treated voyeuristically from the male eyeline. We used this to our advantage and did the same for the boys and girls in our music video.

How effective is the combination of your main product and ancillary texts?

To build an effective combination of work we decided we must create a brand or some kind of theme that can be noticed throughout our project, I believe we created a brand image and this proved very effective as it not only could be seen but enhanced our project in many ways, it is enhanced as we presented our idea in the same way throughout, making our video and possibly our production company recognisable straight away.

In the video we used many branding elements, these included fast editing, the voyeuristic treatment of the male and female body as well as copycat shots that mimic typical hip-hop images, this development shows that we have the ability to mimic a genre in such a way that our audience will notice that we are parodying. This parody also shows that we can target an audience and bring them something which will be humorous and with the help of camera work and editing we can develop this into such a product that is successful. As the music video is the bulk of the project, it was the first thing we thought about, the magazine advert and the digipak were side projects completed with the music video in mind, this means they were designed to be effective in combination with the main product.

The digipak can be related instantly to a few moments in the music video, this is where our model’s eye colour changes as she blinks (the changing eye colour is the focal point of the album and the album cover) and another part of the digipak which is relative to the music video is the background, which looks just like pink food colouring or ink being dropped in water, one of the shots in our music video includes this. Our first idea for the digipak was simply a female face with a thick moustache, which, I think would work well in combination with the music video as it has the same comical switch of male and female, but we decided that this would not look professional, after all we wanted our product to look as much like the real thing as possible.

 I believe our use of the colour pink is a main theme of the whole project, our blog is even pink! This was because of the song, ‘Milkshake’ which we believe is very much a pink themed song. On the back of our digipak we used certain items that you would often see on a CD, the production companies and the label, a barcode (which will take you straight to our website if scanned by a QR scanner app) and I believe this enhances it.

The magazine advert for a single and a music video typically features the album cover as a main attraction, so we decided we would do this, we provided two different magazine adverts, one including our album cover in the middle, and the other held a deconstructed version of our album cover, revealing more of our background, this follows the established norms of a magazine advert as it is bold and it has the barcode and record label logos as well as the artist name and release date.

What have you learned from your audience feedback?

Our target audience profile was those aged between 16 and 25, we targeted both males and females as well as fans of all music, but specifically those who listen to garage and R&B,  we decided this because of some of the adult themes of our music video, as well as the fact that the song appeals to this audience, the song has been a massive success in the humour department as it has many intertextual references throughout television and film.  As our music video is designed with humour as a key aspect, the audience must be able to understand the fact that it is not a serious video designed  to appeal to men or women’s sexual desires. For this reason we have excluded the older population from our target audience.

We tailored our music video in several ways to appeal to this audience, we put in several voyeuristic images that would not just appeal aesthetically to the male/female viewer but would lead the female/male viewer to believe it’s “just another hip-hop video” but then be astounded by the switchover. I believe the audience will be hooked by our music video as it is very easy to watch but hard to pull yourself away from, I also believe that our ancillary texts are so well developed that they will make our target audience want to watch the music video and look into more of UV PRODUCTIONS work.

 After we finished our music video and ancillary texts we received lots of compliments, this was from many of our target audience, unfortunately, as we only have access to a few audience members at the top end of our spectrum, the majority of people who have seen it are in the bottom end, this makes our data a bit off key, however we have had extremely high demand from classmates and those from our school to see the video, this is partly due to word of mouth and partly because of the fact two boys were scantily clad and washing a car which proved a big hit with those of our age, laughing and shock horror was common among the viewers.

There were a total of three viewings to the class in order to get feedback and the music video was changed after every one, comments were written down and taken on board, when the digipak and magazine cover were being developed we received comments and compliments that helped us along the way.

From this audience feedback I feel very confident that if our product was put next to another that was produced by a very successful company that it would fare well in a contest. I believe we made a music video to the best of our ability and maximised the technology and resources we had at our fingertips. If the products were used to promote the single and artist I think that they would work very well and boost sales, this is because the video would thrive due to word of mouth.

How did you use new media technologies in the research, planning, construction and evaluation stages?

In our whole product we used an arsenal of equipment ranging from the latest Photoshop programming to our blog and what you are reading this on, Wix.

Our first venture into the technology side of media was research, we used sites such as google and youtube to look at videos that inspire us and create a mood board, we created a wordstorm using a site called Wordle, this helps you create a great way to present a few ideas. We did present our idea using Powerpoint and recorded this, you can see this on our blog. We created a blog on blogger which we posted everything to do with our project onto, blogger allows you to tailor your page in many ways, we tried out many backgrounds throughout our project and found our present one to be the most effective, it opens up into many different views of our posts, a limitation of our previous themes was that we could not post big enough pictures that justify our work, this was the main reason for a theme change.

To produce the magazine advert and the digipak we used a stills camera, Nikon D40 and the basic shooting facilities such as a green screen which were available for us in the media centre. The green screen made it a lot easier to edit the photos we shot. To edit our digipak together I used photoshop, inside photoshop we installed brushes and templates to ensure our digipak was smooth and looked professional, obviously we didn’t have the facilities to print out the CD and digipak in order to distribute them for feedback, but we made it look as legitimate as we could.

The camera we used in order to film our scenes we used was a Nikon D40 with automatic or manual focus and exposure and wide screen capacity. We also used a tripod with pan and tilt controls. We experienced several problems with the filming including only having one camera and one chance to get a shot (milkshake smashing) and getting the right focus. Many shots had to be re-done after we keyframed them in our editing software as they were not clear when zoomed. We eventually got the hang of using the technology to it’s arête.  

For the editing of the music video we used Final Cut Pro Express, this took a while to get our head’s around but we ended up with a good edit, we used keyframing heavily, as well as special effects such as colour enhancing. We had problems with the speed of editing as it is a lengthy process but learning the shortcuts greatly enhanced our ability to save time.

This is the link to my Wix

Evaluation by Sophie Pritchard

Q1. In what ways does your media product use, develop or challenge forms and conventions of real media products.

Our media product includes a music video, a digipak and a magazine advert, all of which that follow music video forms and conventions and also Goodwin’s music video theory. The music video that we created is a conceptual video as it does not follow a narrative; instead it involves random different ideas that have been combined together to create a comical and interesting video. The style and genre of the music video is a comedy as we have created irony within it by taking traditional stereotypes of an R&B music video and playing with these ideas to create something funny.

The way we were able to make sure our music video followed the forms and conventions of a professional music video were through Andrew Goodwin writing in ‘Dancing in the Distraction Factory’ (Routledge 1992.) The first point Goodwin creates is music videos demonstrate genre characteristics. The music which we used for our video is ‘Milkshake’ by Kelis ft Mightyfools which is an R&B/ dance song. To portray this within our video we decided to use the characteristics of an R&B music video and a dance music video however to create it to be comical. The characteristics we used are sexual elements such as the washing of a car in a bikini, female dancers and eating of strawberries.

The reason why we did this was that within our genre of music videos, many of these elements are used often for example in the music video 'Candy Shop' by 50 Cent. They have become traditional within that genre. So to create our music video to be professional we decided to include them. If we were to copy each element exactly like how the professionals have done that would create our music video to not be unique so therefore we created it to be a comedy by making the stereotypical sexy females washing the car to be males wearing bikinis washing a car.

We gained this idea from the video by Aphex Twin, ‘Windowlicker' as this includes horrifically, ugly men being portrayed as women.

 The second point Goodwin makes is if there is a relationship between the lyrics and the visuals. We accomplished doing this throughout our music video mainly by involving milkshakes. We included this in various parts of our video as by involving milkshakes makes the lyrics relate to the visuals.

  This was the only way we could relate the lyrics to the visuals because with the song being a remix there is no established lyrics within the song.
Third point stated is if there is a relationship between the music and the visuals. Are video definitely follows this point as the music for our video has a range of paces throughout, so we have fitted our visuals to go alongside the beats of the song. An example that shows this well is a part of the song where the pace increases dramatically, getting faster and faster, so to relate the music to the visuals we made the visuals cut to the beat and tempo which is where you see the morphing of a female into a male. 

Within our video we do include elements which involve frequent notion of looking, which is the 5th point Goodwin makes. We have many parts in the video that portray people in the video in a sexual way. For example the female dancers are dressed in a way that creates them to be sexy as they are wearing a leotard and high heels.

There is also camera angles that enhances this and shows voyeuristic treatment of the female body such as low angles, close ups and tilting to reveal the body this being a male gaze. The dancers in the video where also given a sexy choreographed dance which on its own gives the sense that they are on sexual display to the audience.

The last point made my Andrew Goodwin is if there is intertextual references made within the video. Within our video we did not use exact intertextuality however we did include common characteristics that are seen in many famous music videos such as 'These Boots are made for Walking' by Jessica Simpson which has a classic car wash scene in it.

The forms and conventions if our music video does however indicate our influences for certain parts of the video like as mentioned before The Aphex Twins - 'Windowlicker' was our main inspiration for the video as we liked the way the video created irony around the sexual elements within R&B music videos.

http://www.wix.com/sophielouise_1994/music-video-evaluation#!question-1

Evaluation by Sophie Pritchard

Q2. How effective is the combination of your main product and ancillary texts?

In order to create an effective product being our music video it is important that we have made a brand image for our product so that our product becomes distinctive to the company brand.

First of all we created a digipak and we knew in order to make it professional looking and as realistic as possible we must include conventions which are within a traditional album cover and digipak.

The elements we have included are the record labels logo, the production company’s logo, a list of the sound tracks on the album, the title of the albums name and artist, copyright information, a background image and a continuous theme throughout. By doing all of this it has made our digipak look professional and now includes the forms and conventions needed for a digipak.

The front cover of our digipak involves an image of a girls eyes however is repeated in strips showing her eye colour to be different in each strip.  The colours used for the eye colours are bright and bold which is a continuous theme within our company as we want to come across as fun and appealing to a teenage generation. The image has an overall pink hint as pink being a feminine colour it implies about the sexual theme within our music video. The image takes up the whole page as it is a close up photograph; this creates to be more eye catching. We have used the same font within the digipak as this sticks to the conventions and forms, another element which makes us recognisable as a brand. The font is sharp and in capital letters which again is eye catching.


The influences we gained which inspired us for the digipak was the music video ‘Bad Romance’ by Lady Gaga. The reason being is within this videos there is clips of her which shows her eyes to be enlarged and doll like, this inspired us as we found this very interesting to look at and memorable.

We wanted to create something like this to be within our music video, our digipak and our magazine advert. We came up with the idea of using coloured eye contacts as with our music production being called UV productions we wanted a UV theme to be throughout our brand. So by having brightly coloured eye contacts this would be noticeable and be memorable to our brand.

Within the magazine we also had to contain the forms and conventions that are involved within a magazine advert which are also within the digipak, such as the logos, titles, images etc. We also decided that we must stick to the same forms and conventions as we have done with the digipak in order to stick to the same theme throughout.

. As done in our digipak our magazine includes the same font and image as this is what creates our brand to have a theme and also sticking to the brightly used colours allows our product to be appealing to our target audience. For the background of our magazine advert we have used an effect which creates a liquid effect as if paint is been put into water. This element has been included in our music video and also in our digipak which has been a successful way of linking the products together to be from one brand. 

Overall we as a group have tried to include elements and themes within our brand to connect our products together; we have also used traditional forms and conventions in order to create our product to be professional looking. 

http://www.wix.com/sophielouise_1994/music-video-evaluation#!question-2

Evaluation by Sophie Pritchard

Q3. What have you learned from your audience feedback?

In order to gain the target audience we wanted we carried out some research of what a dance music fan is interested in, in order to advertise and create the right characteristics within our music product. We then came up with a demographic who had a particular interest in dance music, the demographic is a male, his age is 18, his likes are DJ'ing and clubbing, his favorite past time is reading Mixmag, his favorite TV shows are Misfits, Everybody Loves Raymond and Skins and his favorite music video channel is MTV Dance.

We decided on these particular things as through researching different medias we found out what particular medias target to a dance music fan which resulted in the many things listed above. To be accurate with our demographic we researched on the website BARB which holds all the information about TV channel ratings and presented us with the information of what channels reached the most viewing hours which allowed us to get an idea of what channels would show our music video to our demographic.

Through doing research on dance music videos it was apparent that there is certain characteristics which are involved within the videos, such as upbeat edits, energetic context, for example a club scene. Through doing target audience research through his likes and dislikes it shows that he would want the characteristics of a dance music video to be shown. We created a presentation to show to an audience of our target age being 17 and older to demonstrate to them what our music video would include.

From showing this presentation we created some questionnaires for our audience to fill out to see if they believed our music video would work and if they think it would reach to our target demographic. By doing this it was extremely beneficial for me and my group as it allowed us to see if we needed to change elements to make are aim more reachable.

The questionnaires informed us that we were heading in the right direction as the characteristics we wanted to involve did show that our genre of music would be a cross between dance music and R&B music which was our aim. The questionnaires also showed us that our target demographics age was right as the majority agreed to the age group.
Many dance music videos are simply of a clubbing scene however this would be hard to create with the resources we as a group have, so therefore we had to come up with an idea which would have some dance music characteristics but also have other elements. We decided to create a comical side to the video as within our demographics likes, was the TV show 'Everybody Loves Raymond' which is an American comedy.

With being the same age as our demographic we as a group knew that many 18 year olds watch comedy shows so therefore having a comedy element within the video would still be appealing to our target audience. Through doing further research on professional music videos we realised that in many of the videos there is a sexual element, this is shown in such videos as Bob Sinclar 'What I Want,' here it shows women  in a stereotypical way to be shown as perfect.

Through knowing this we thought for our music video we would contain this however create it to be ironic in order to show comedy. Through including all of these elements we believe that this would gain the interest of our target audience as we believe as a group that through the representation of sexuality and showing aspects of stereotypical characteristics of a dance music video being the showing of sexy female dancers and having certain situations such as washing a car in swimwear is extremely engaging for a teenage male. Also comedy being appealing to our audience we would include this to gain are audience attention.

http://www.wix.com/sophielouise_1994/music-video-evaluation#!question-3

Evaluation by Sophie Pritchard

Q4. How did you use new media technologies in the research, planning, construction and evaluation stages?

While creating our overall media product we used a variety of technologies in helping us along the way in many areas of our product such as cameras, tripods, internet, Photoshop, blogger and several other technologies.

Within the video production of our product we had to consider the equipment we needed in order to create our intended music video. The equipment we used for this was a Sanyo HD camera, a tripod and a portable site light. The camera we used was good as it allowed us to capture the footage we wanted. Also when using this camera it allowed us to capture high resolution footage therefore resulting us in having a more professional looking video. Before using this camera we was given a different camera to use which was more dated, tape video recorder which was producing low quality footage so when given the HD camera we was very pleased at the difference in quality.

The first image shows the first camera we used which produced blurry, out of focus footage however the second image shows the Sanyo HD camera which gave us high quality footage.

The only issue we found when using the HD camera was that when zooming in on the camera it would become out of focus, leaving us with blurry footage. We overcame this issue by zooming in on the parts we wanted to be close up when on the editing suite. The tripod we used was very ideal as its features created us to be able to get the certain shots and angles we wanted in the video. When wanting to have a low angle or a high angle we could do this due to the range in height the tripod went which was very good quality.

Here these images show the variety in anlges the tripod allowed us to do.

Also other elements of the tripod such as the pan and tilt controls let us gain different camera shots, adding variety to our video. When using the tripod as well we could gain a steady shot, making it to be professional. When shooting in different locations this meant that the lighting changed each time and also when filming the lighting at points was very dull. To solve this we used a portable site light which we was able to use indoors and outdoors. Using the artificial light made our shots look much more vibrant.

The first image here shows our shots without the artificial lighting and then the second image shows the massive improvement in vibrancy and colour when using it.

When editing our video we also used technologies to help us, the main one being the software on Apple, Final Cut Express. As this was mine and my groups first time using this software we had to get to grips with the controls available. To do this we created some short clips and played around with tools to see what effects we could create. We also had to work out the ways in cutting and rearranging footage before working on our material. Here is one of our short video clips that we created in order to get used to the technology.


Once we knew how to use the editing software we was able to use it very efficiently. We found cutting our footage very easy and also fitting in the cuts to the beat. One thing when editing our footage that we was not pleased about was the vibrancy of the colours. As our production company being UV we wanted all the colours in our video to be bright and colourful so to change the colours we used the colour effects which allowed us to change the brightness, contrast and hue of our colours which really made a difference to our video.

We was overall very pleased the outcome of our video due to the software we was available to. The Mac computers were also a great help as with the large screens we was able to cut footage to the exact points we wanted.
Technologies also played a big role when creating our digipak and our magazine advert. For the magazine and the digipak we had to take some photographs in order to have images to use. The camera we used to take these photos was an Nikon D40 digital stills camera which created us to have high resolution photographs, which was especially good as we wanted close ups so therefore the quality of the photos was of a high standard, making our products look professional.

When editing our photos we used Adobe CS4 Photoshop which was a great software to touch up any imperfections of the photos. Also for our digipak and magazine advert we wanted to use a particular photo however to change the colour of the eyes in the image. We did this very easily with using Adobe Photoshop as the tools available are very straightforward however creates top quality effects.

We also used Adobe Photoshop in other areas of our work such as when creating our company production logo and also when making the morphing section of our music video we had to align all the photographs so that the bodies were in line with each other and to also to make sure they all had the same lighting to allow the stop motion to work effectively.

Another technology that has helped us hugely throughout the process has been Web 2.0. the reason for this is it allowed us to carry out a wide range of research, giving us access to websites such as YouTube and search engines. Also it allowed us to use Blogger which we used to hold all of our progress and information about creating our products, acting as a diary to our stages of creation.

Overall the software and hardware we was available to during the whole process of creating our music video, our digipak and magazine advert has been extremely useful and to our advantage. We have been able to create high quality products through the technologies we have used.

http://www.wix.com/sophielouise_1994/music-video-evaluation#!question-4